The Boulder city manager now says she's proposing only to close city parks -- and not open space areas -- at night, but she also cited examples Thursday of incidents at the Occupy encampments that illustrate the need for such closures.

The City Council will have a public hearing on the proposed closure rule Tuesday evening.

In a memo published Thursday as part of the agenda for next week's meeting, City Manager Jane Brautigam said she plans to take out references to city open space from the measure. As previously written, it would have prohibited people from staying in city parks and open space areas from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. The closures would still allow people to pass through.

At the request of the City Council, the Open Space Board of Trustees has already been looking into closing open space overnight, and Brautigam decided to let that board make its recommendation to the elected leaders.

"She has decided to let the board consider that issue in upcoming months," said Sarah Huntley, a city spokeswoman.

The memo also cited some of the reasons the City Manager's Office thinks a closure rule is needed -- in addition to existing no-camping ordinances -- including a recent surge in citations, sanitation and safety concerns at the Occupy encampments.

Occupy protesters said at a town hall meeting Wednesday night that existing ordinances are sufficient, and they challenged city officials to come up with proof that the encampments are a safety or health hazard.

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The memo pointed out that since Occupy Boulder began setting up tents outside of the County Courthouse at 1300 Pearl St. and later outside of the Municipal Building at 1777 Broadway, police have issued 44 citations to 39 people.

The city staff says the increase in citations has put a strain on its court system. Eleven defendants have set 15 trials in Boulder Municipal Court for January 2012, after only 20 trials in all of 2011.

Police have said the citations are not deterring the campers, and they are having a hard time enforcing existing ordinances, which require officers to catch a person engaged in "activities of daily living" in a tent or some other sort of shelter in a public area. Officers said people in the encampment have developed a lookout system to wake up other campers who may be sleeping.

"This gamesmanship is a waste of valuable police resources," officials said in the memo.

City officials also said the encampments are becoming a sanitation hazard. In one instance, firefighters responding to a drunken camper vomiting in his tent also found a bucket of urine and human feces at the site. But like camping ordinances, public urination and defecation citations can only be issued if an officer catches the person in the act.

The city also said there has been at least one assault and a heroin overdose in the encampment, and one camper was using propane in his tent. While they were camped on the courthouse lawn, police say, some of the campers disconnected the county's holiday lights and ran extension cords across the snow to provide electricity in the camp.

The memo states that although the Occupy movement is the most "egregious and visible of these violations," the rule is designed to eliminate all encampments and is not infringing on the group's First Amendment rights. Occupy protesters have said the timing of the proposal shows that Brautigam is targeting them and their message.

The city staff said "the proposed rule is the most effective and least intrusive means to protect the city's parks and open space from those who would seize those spaces for their own use to the exclusion of others," according to the memo.

Officials said the measure is not unlike those already enforced by other cities, including Longmont, Denver and Broomfield.

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